SALISBURY — As a teen, the Rev. Dr. Carl M. Fisher attended the Nuremberg Trials, but it hasn’t been his only brush with history.
Fisher, a retired Lutheran minister, spent an hour alone with Mother Theresa in Calcutta, India, in 1984.
When his family was in Japan during the Korean War, Fisher took baseball great Joe DiMaggio on a personal tour of Tokyo General Hospital so he could visit wounded Americans.
Also in Tokyo in 1951, he ordered a pool-side lunch for Jack Benny and his wife, Marjorie Reynolds, at the Washington Heights Club.
In 1966 in New Delhi, India, Fisher and his wife, Miriam, had a private tea with President Sanvepalli Radhakrishnam.
In 2005, he and Miriam spent “a pleasant evening with Bette Midler in New York City.”
But there’s more. At age 60, Fisher ran with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. At 70, he and his wife parasailed in Cancun, Mexico. At 75, he climbed Machu Picchu in Peru, and at 80, he spent a week on the Amazon River.
It all goes back to a love of travel instilled in him by his late father and mother, the Rev. Roy and Ethel Fisher.
Carl Fisher’s half century of ministry took him to Trinity Lutheran Church in Concord; Holy Cross Lutheran in Ipoh, Malaysia; the Lutheran Church of the Ascension in Savannah, Ga.; and Cross and Crown Lutheran in Matthews.
He organized and developed the latter church, from which he retired in 1998. The church’s educational building is named for him.
Trinity Lutheran named Fisher pastor emeritus in 2008. In 2011, Cross and Crown Lutheran gave him the same honor.
Fisher’s career included missionary work in Malaysia and Singapore for 15 years. He has provided training and orientation for 200 missionaries throughout the world.
Fisher also has been an administrator: bishop of the Lutheran Church in Malaysia and Singapore for eight years and director for the Office on Mission, Service and Development of the Lutheran World Federation.
There’s more to the Fisher resume. A few more highlights:
• He served nine years on the board of trustees for Lenoir-Rhyne University.
• He speaks Cantonese.
• Lenoir-Rhyne gave him a honorary doctor of divinity degree in 1973, when he was only 39.
• Several times he was named to Who’s Who Among Religious Leaders in both Asia and the world.
• He founded a federation of Lutheran churches in Malaysia and Singapore comprising some 80,000 members.
Fisher’s surviving sisters are Roselyn Misenheimer of Salisbury and Dr. Marjorie Matthews of Pilot Mountain.

Contact Mark Wineka at 704-797-4263.